Gatekeeping the Weird Web
Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites
Via Ars Technica and my Bluesky feed, I saw today that NeoCities has been fighting Bing because Bing, for some reason, has been completely blocking NeoCities. This isn't an exaggeration, either: Kyle Drake, the site's founder/webmaster, noticed through his logs that traffic from Bing dropped to literally zero. And this wasn't a harmless, "guess we're not getting any traffic from Bing, oh well" problem, either:
Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.
Uhhhh.
So he got in touch with Microsoft, or tried to. Really what he had was an AI chatbot (because, well, that's all Microsoft seems to do these days), and a ticketing system that seemed to bury his tickets; he suspects the system was probably flooded with people trying to improve their SEO, and I don't doubt it, because isn't that the way of the web these days, a bunch of selfish twits making things hard to impossible for everything else. It wasn't until Ars Technica reached out to Microsoft that some of the blocks got removed. And it's only some: the front page got re-added, but certain high-profile sites that should've been ranking, weren't. Partial success.
At this point, Google's place of pre-eminence has been unchallenged for the last twenty-five years. It's hard to understate that: it's a full quarter century. Yahoo!, one of the previous giants, fell on hard times, being sold over and over for markedly less money each time. Search has been more or less ceded to the two companies ever since: between the two of them, they control 95% of the search engine market. Yandex, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo bring up the rear, none of them even touching 2%. And it's a shame, because the first quarter of the 21st century has consolidated market share everywhere amongst a few giants. Social media in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter; Search in Google and Bing; chat in WhatsApp and Discord. This has been on the whole disastrous, as companies have been able to do basically whatever they want; and without any serious challenger, seem to hang on indefinitely despite their mistakes, laziness, and ill-intent.
When a company like Bing (or, God forbid, Google) decides to block your site, you're in serious trouble. Because fewer and fewer people even see the web as a medium for their online activities (preferring instead a handful of apps on their phones), the elimination of traffic makes a precarious situation even more dire.
The web has a gatekeeping problem: Google and Bing collectively decide who sees what, and if they decide they don't want people to see your site, there's actually very little you can do. Ars Technica will go to bat for NeoCities because it's a (large? medium-large?) site that despite its flaws and dark corners represents something good, a reverberation of the old, weird web. But Ars isn't going to write about how Microsoft is blocking your own personal website, or your friend's blog, or that forum you host on DigitalOcean. It was hard to pick up traffic before. Post-block, it's basically impossible.
Google has been bad for a while now, favouring commercial sites, Reddit, and providing AI answers atop everything else. Bing hasn't been any better (at least DuckDuckGo has a no-AI search option). It's felt like a better search engine has had a glorious opening for the last several years at least. But maybe that's how it's felt from my perspective, as someone who still uses the web in the way he did decades ago. I want to see people's websites, I want to see what they make and what interests them. I'm less concerned about the same shitty joke chains on Reddit, I deleted my Twitter account years ago, and I have an Instagram account I created a decade ago but I've never used it once. No, I want to make and see websites, I want to meet weird people through their weird interests, and I'm tired of the corporate era of the net. Gemini has been wonderful, one of the last true spaces exclusively for people, but it's not everything. And for everything else, I'd love to see someone new come in and do to search what Google did in 2001. It's time.